Science
Millions of Americans need drugs like Ozempic. Will it bankrupt the healthcare system?
An April 24 letter from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to the CEO of Novo Nordisk began with heartfelt thanks to the Danish drugmaker for inventing Ozempic and Wegovy, two medications poised to improve the health of tens of millions of Americans with obesity and related diseases.
But the senator’s grateful tone faded rapidly.
“As important as these drugs are, they will not do any good for the millions of patients who cannot afford them,” Sanders wrote. “Further, if the prices for these products are not substantially reduced they also have the potential to bankrupt Medicare, Medicaid, and our entire health care system.”
It’s a sentiment that comes up regularly among people who are huge fans of the medications and their close relatives, Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound. All of them work by masquerading as a natural hormone called GLP-1 and tricking the body into slowing digestion and reducing blood sugar.
The medications help patients lose double-digit percentages of their body weight and keep it off — an average of 12.4% in the clinical trial for Wegovy, and an average of 18% at the highest dose in the trial for Zepound. It’s rare for insurance companies to cover GLP-1 drugs for weight loss alone, and Medicare is forbidden by law from doing so. But as the pounds fall, so do the risks of serious problems like type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks and strokes, and the medications can be covered to prevent these conditions.
“Obesity is a huge public health crisis, and for so long we had no treatments that really made a difference,” said Dr. Lauren Eberly, a cardiologist and health services researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “These medicines could change the trajectory of your disease and save your life.”
That makes these drugs extremely valuable. Unfortunately, they’re also extremely expensive.
The sticker price for Ozempic, which the Food and Drug Administration approved to treat type 2 diabetes, is more than $12,600 per year. Wegovy, a higher-dose version approved for weight loss in people with obesity and as a way for overweight patients with cardiovascular disease to reduce their risk of heart attack and stroke, retails for nearly $17,600 a year.
Mounjaro and Zepbound mimic GLP-1 as well as a related hormone called glucose-dependent insulinotropic peptide, or GIP. Their list prices add up to roughly $13,900 per year for Mounjaro, which is approved as a diabetes treatment, and about $13,800 per year for Zepbound, the weight-loss version.
Eberly said those prices are simply too high.
“We as a public health medical community — and the community at large — really need to advocate for increased affordability,” she said. “I think we’re overdue for a real reckoning on this.”
In the United States, the tab for these GLP-1 drugs is exorbitant almost any way you look at it.
In 2022, the prescription drug that accounted for the biggest share of Medicare Part D spending was the blood thinner Eliquis. More than 3.5 million beneficiaries used it that year, at a cost of $15.2 billion, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says.
That total was more than double the amount spent on the next-costliest drug, the type 2 diabetes medication Trulicity, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS.
But $15.2 billion is practically a rounding error compared to the $268-billion price tag if Wegovy were to be provided to all 19.7 million Medicare beneficiaries with obesity, researchers estimated in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Even if the drug were prescribed only to Medicare patients with a clinical diagnosis of obesity, the cost would exceed $135 billion. That’s more than the $130 billion Medicare spent on all retail prescription drugs in 2022, according to CMS.
“This is a real budgetary situation for CMS,” said Melissa Barber, a public health economist who studies pharmaceutical policy at Yale School of Medicine. “They’re going to have to deal with this.”
No matter how expensive a drug, it’s “extremely unlikely” that Medicare would actually go bankrupt, a CMS spokesperson said. Spending for the Medicare Part B and Part D programs is reset every year, and if it goes up, beneficiaries and the government share the burden of covering the difference, the spokesperson said.
Sanders offered another perspective. A report released this month by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which he chairs, noted that Americans get charged $1,349 for a 28-day supply of Wegovy, while the same amount of the medication goes for $186 in Denmark, $137 in Germany and $92 in the United Kingdom.
“The prices for these drugs are so high in the United States that everyone — regardless of whether they use the products or not — will likely be forced to bear the burden of Novo Nordisk’s profit maximizing strategy through higher insurance premiums and taxes,” Sanders wrote in his letter to the company.
The financial impact on Medicare is tempered by a 2003 federal law that prevents the government health insurance program from covering weight-loss medications.The drugs can be added to formularies if prescribed for another “medically accepted indication,” such as to treat type 2 diabetes or reduce heart risk, but patients can’t get it if their only medical issue is obesity.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) has introduced a bill that would reverse that 2003 ban. Though the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act has 97 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle, its financial implications have made it difficult to muster the votes needed for the legislation to advance, he said.
Indeed, Phillip Swagel, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said last month that if the goal was to provide weight-loss drugs without increasing the deficit, their net cost would need to fall by a factor of 10 just to “get in the ballpark.”
Dr. Caroline Apovian, co-director of the Center for Weight Management and Wellness at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, is concerned that the budget-busting potential of Wegovy and Zepbound has made private health insurers too scared to cover them.
“No insurance company is going to be able to afford to give these lifesaving drugs to the 42% of Americans with obesity,” she said. “So we have to do something.”
Exactly what that something should be is not clear.
One possibility is for the federal government to ask Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly to discount their GLP-1 drugs. The Inflation Reduction Act empowers Medicare to negotiate lower prices for 10 medicines each year, and researchers in the Congressional Budget Office expect at least some GLP-1s to make the list “within the next few years.”
Private insurers are free to seek deals of their own, and the similarities between the Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly drugs give insurers quite a lot of bargaining power, said John Cawley, a health economist at Cornell.
“They should be more effective at playing them off each other,” Cawley said. “They can say, ‘We’re only going to cover one of these. Which do you want to be, the one we cover or the one we don’t?’”
There’s reason to think the drugmakers could afford to offer significant discounts if they were so inclined.
Novo Nordisk charges Americans $968.52 for a 28-day supply of Ozempic, regardless of whether the dose of the active ingredient semaglutide is 0.5, 1 or 2 milligrams per injectable pen. Likewise, Wegovy is priced at $1,349.02 every 28 days, no matter whether the weekly injections contain 0.25, 0.5, 1, 1.7 or 2.4 mg of semaglutide.
Yet a 2022 report in the journal Obesity estimated that a 2.4-mg weekly dose of semaglutide could be made for “about $40” a month.
Barber is part of a team that also examined what it would cost to produce various diabetes drugs using methods designed to keep prices low. Her group calculated that a 30-day supply of an injectable medicine with 0.77 milligrams of semaglutide could be manufactured for as little as 89 cents, a total that includes a 10% profit. Even with higher costs and a 50% profit, the drug could be made for $4.73 a month, the team reported in March in JAMA Network Open.
“They could be very affordable,” Barber said.
A spokeswoman for Novo Nordisk said the company was “unaware of the analysis” used in the study, but it recognizes the need to find ways to make its products more affordable. She also said the company is reviewing the report from Sanders’ Senate committee and noted that “75% of our gross US sales goes to rebates and discounts reimbursed to insurance companies and other payers.”
Representatives from Eli Lilly did not comment on the cost of its drugs.
If manufacturers don’t agree to reduce prices voluntarily, the federal government could take more forceful steps. The Inflation Reduction Act put a $35-a-month limit on what seniors with Medicare Part D plans need to pay for insulin. Congress could set a limit on GLP-1 drug prices too, though that would be “a last resort,” said Lawrence Gostin, an authority on public health law at Georgetown University.
Rationing the drugs is another way to keep spending in check, health economists say. High sticker prices have limited access to the drugs, often making income a determining factor in deciding who can take them and who must go without. But there are other ways to prioritize patients.
A person with a “healthy weight” — defined as a body mass index between 18.5 and 24.9 — incurs about $2,780 a year in healthcare costs, on average. That figure rises by $2,781 for a person with a BMI of 30 or above , according to the 2024 edition of “The Handbook of Obesity.”
Most of those added costs are concentrated among people at the higher end of the BMI curve. Someone with a BMI between 35 and 39.9 requires $3,336 in additional health spending per year, on average, while a person with a BMI of 40 or above needs an extra $6,493 in medical care.
“If your goal is to target interventions in order to reduce healthcare spending, you’d want to target it to people with more extreme or morbid obesity,” said Cawley, who co-wrote the handbook’s chapter on obesity’s economic toll.
Even if all else fails, prices are bound to fall over a period of years as new drugs win FDA approval and make the market more competitive, economists said. And once generic versions become available, prices will plummet. That’s what happened with pricey medications for hepatitis C and HIV.
“Eventually things become generic,” Wenstrup said. “They still do the same thing but it costs less.”
SACRAMENTO — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has positioned himself as a national public health leader by staking out science-backed policies in contrast with the Trump administration.
After Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez for refusing what her lawyers called “the dangerous politicization of science,” Newsom hired her to help modernize California’s public health system. He also gave a job to Debra Houry, the agency’s former chief science and medical officer, who had resigned in protest hours after Monarez’s firing.
Newsom also teamed up with fellow Democratic governors Tina Kotek of Oregon, Bob Ferguson of Washington and Josh Green of Hawaii to form the West Coast Health Alliance, a regional public health agency, whose guidance the governors said would “uphold scientific integrity in public health as Trump destroys” the CDC’s credibility. Newsom argued establishing the independent alliance was vital as Kennedy leads the Trump administration’s rollback of national vaccine recommendations.
More recently, California became the first state to join a global outbreak response network coordinated by the World Health Organization, followed by Illinois and New York. Colorado and Wisconsin signaled they plan to join. They did so after President Trump officially withdrew the United States from the agency on the grounds that it had “strayed from its core mission and has acted contrary to the U.S. interests in protecting the U.S. public on multiple occasions.” Newsom said joining the WHO-led consortium would enable California to respond faster to communicable disease outbreaks and other public health threats.
Although other Democratic governors and public health leaders have openly criticized the federal government, few have been as outspoken as Newsom, who is considering a run for president in 2028 and is in his second and final term as governor. Members of the scientific community have praised his effort to build a public health bulwark against the Trump administration’s slashing of funding and scaling back of vaccine recommendations.
What Newsom is doing “is a great idea,” said Paul Offit, an outspoken critic of Kennedy and a vaccine expert who formerly served on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee but was removed under Trump in 2025.
“Public health has been turned on its head,” Offit said. “We have an anti-vaccine activist and science denialist as the head of U.S. Health and Human Services. It’s dangerous.”
The White House did not respond to questions about Newsom’s stance and Health and Human Services declined requests to interview Kennedy. Instead, federal health officials criticized Democrats broadly, arguing that blue states are participating in fraud and mismanagement of federal funds in public health programs.
Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard said the administration is going after “Democrat-run states that pushed unscientific lockdowns, toddler mask mandates, and draconian vaccine passports during the COVID era.” She said those moves have “completely eroded the American people’s trust in public health agencies.”
Public health guided by science
Since Trump returned to office, Newsom has criticized the president and his administration for engineering policies that he sees as an affront to public health and safety, labeling federal leaders as “extremists” trying to “weaponize the CDC and spread misinformation.” He has excoriated federal officials for erroneously linking vaccines to autism, warning that the administration is endangering the lives of infants and young children in scaling back childhood vaccine recommendations. And he argued that the White House is unleashing “chaos” on America’s public health system in backing out of the WHO.
The governor declined an interview request, but Newsom spokesperson Marissa Saldivar said it’s a priority of the governor “to protect public health and provide communities with guidance rooted in science and evidence, not politics and conspiracies.”
The Trump administration’s moves have triggered financial uncertainty that local officials said has reduced morale within public health departments and left states unprepared for disease outbreaks and prevention efforts. The White House last year proposed cutting Health and Human Services spending by $33 billion, including $3.6 billion from the CDC. Congress largely rejected those cuts last month, although funding for programs focusing on social drivers of health, such as access to food, housing and education, were axed.
The Trump administration announced that it would claw back more than $600 million in public health funds from California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota, arguing that the Democratic-led states were funding “woke” initiatives that didn’t reflect White House priorities. Within days, the states sued and a judge temporarily blocked the cut.
“They keep suddenly canceling grants and then it gets overturned in court,” said Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Assn. of California. “A lot of the damage is already done because counties already stopped doing the work.”
Federal funding has accounted for more than half of state and local health department budgets nationwide, with money going toward fighting HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, preventing chronic diseases, and boosting public health preparedness and communicable disease response, according to a 2025 analysis by KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
Federal funds account for $2.4 billion of California’s $5.3-billion public health budget, making it difficult for Newsom and state lawmakers to backfill potential cuts. That money helps fund state operations and is vital for local health departments.
Funding cuts hurt all
Los Angeles County public health director Barbara Ferrer said if the federal government is allowed to cut that $600 million, the county of nearly 10 million residents would lose an estimated $84 million over the next two years, in addition to other grants for prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Ferrer said the county depends on nearly $1 billion in federal funding annually to track and prevent communicable diseases and combat chronic health conditions, including diabetes and high blood pressure. Already, the county has announced the closure of seven public health clinics that provided vaccinations and disease testing, largely because of funding losses tied to federal grant cuts.
“It’s an ill-informed strategy,” Ferrer said. “Public health doesn’t care whether your political affiliation is Republican or Democrat. It doesn’t care about your immigration status or sexual orientation. Public health has to be available for everyone.”
A single case of measles requires public health workers to track down 200 potential contacts, Ferrer said.
The U.S. eliminated measles in 2000 but is close to losing that status as a result of vaccine skepticism and misinformation spread by vaccine critics. The U.S. had 2,281 confirmed cases last year, the most since 1991, with 93% in people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown. This year, the highly contagious disease has been reported at schools, airports and Disneyland.
Public health officials hope the West Coast Health Alliance can help counteract Trump by building trust through evidence-based public health guidance.
“What we’re seeing from the federal government is partisan politics at its worst and retaliation for policy differences, and it puts at extraordinary risk the health and well-being of the American people,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Assn., a coalition of public health professionals.
Robust vaccine schedule
Erica Pan, California’s top public health officer and director of the state Department of Public Health, said the West Coast Health Alliance is defending science by recommending a more robust vaccine schedule than the federal government. California is part of a coalition suing the Trump administration over its decision to rescind recommendations for seven childhood vaccines, including for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza and COVID-19.
Pan expressed deep concern about the state of public health, particularly the uptick in measles. “We’re sliding backwards,” Pan said of immunizations.
Sarah Kemble, Hawaii’s state epidemiologist, said Hawaii joined the alliance after hearing from pro-vaccine residents who wanted assurance that they would have access to vaccines.
“We were getting a lot of questions and anxiety from people who did understand science-based recommendations but were wondering, ‘Am I still going to be able to go get my shot?’” Kemble said.
Other states led mostly by Democrats have also formed alliances, with Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and several other East Coast states banding together to create the Northeast Public Health Collaborative.
Hilliard, of Health and Human Services, said that even as Democratic governors establish vaccine advisory coalitions, the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices “remains the scientific body guiding immunization recommendations in this country, and HHS will ensure policy is based on rigorous evidence and gold standard science, not the failed politics of the pandemic.”
Influencing red states
Newsom, for his part, has approved a recurring annual infusion of nearly $300 million to support the state Department of Public Health, as well as the 61 local public health agencies across California, and last year signed a bill authorizing the state to issue its own immunization guidance. It requires health insurers in California to provide patient coverage for vaccinations the state recommends even if the federal government doesn’t.
Jeffrey Singer, a doctor and senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said decentralization can be beneficial. That’s because local media campaigns that reflect different political ideologies and community priorities may have a better chance of influencing the public.
A KFF analysis found some red states are joining blue states in decoupling their vaccine recommendations from the federal government’s. Singer said some doctors in his home state of Arizona are looking to more liberal California for vaccine recommendations.
“Science is never settled, and there are a lot of areas of this country where there are differences of opinion,” Singer said. “This can help us challenge our assumptions and learn.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.
Two friends bought nearly identical homes last year, in the same northern Minnesota neighborhood, for the same price.
But Tara Novak pays more than twice as much for home insurance as Petra Rodriguez. The only difference? Ms. Novak has a lower credit score.
Across the country, people with weaker credit histories are paying far more for home insurance than owners with spotless records.
Where the home insurance rate gap between “fair” and “excellent” credit is higher
Home insurance premiums have risen rapidly in recent years, fueled by climate change, building costs and inflation. The price shock has rippled into the real estate market, dragging down home prices in areas vulnerable to disasters and leading insurers to abandon homeowners in risky places.
But these dynamics obscure another problem: The home insurance market has cleaved in two along a boundary defined more by a customer’s personal history than by the risk of a disaster hitting their home.
Americans with weaker credit histories, usually from missed payments or high amounts of debt, now pay significantly more for insurance, regardless of where they live, two new studies have found. While those with poor credit histories often can’t purchase homes at all, people with “fair” scores, which range from around 580 to 669, are paying twice as much in some places as people with “excellent” scores of about 800 or higher. And the gap is growing.
Insurers use a metric based on credit history known as an insurance score to set rates, and the figure tracks closely with a customer’s credit score.
The penalty for having a “fair” credit history versus an “excellent” one
States with the biggest pricing gaps
That can mean owners of identical homes, like Ms. Novak and Ms. Rodriguez, pay wildly different rates to insure them. For most people, it’s now just as expensive to have a credit score of “fair” as it is to live in an area likely to experience a disaster like a hurricane or wildfire. About 29 percent of consumers have credit scores that are categorized as “fair” or “poor.”
“There’s so many reasons people have bad credit,” Ms. Novak said. “It’s not like I’ve ever not paid a bill on time. I’m a stickler on my bills, I’m a stickler on my rent, never been late. This is not fair.”
“The choice to use credit scores in pricing means that those lower-credit home owners in risky areas are effectively subsidizing more affluent high-credit homeowners who also live in risky areas,” said Nick Graetz, assistant professor of sociology at the University for Minnesota, who wrote one of the recent papers. “So in a lot of ways, you can keep your insurance price down if you’re high income, high credit — even if you live on the coast of Florida.”
A handful of states have banned insurers from using credit data because of concerns about fairness and the potential for discrimination against low-income people and people of color, but the majority allow it.
For those with both weaker credit and high disaster risk, the combination can set them up for a downward spiral: disasters tend to be followed by decreases in credit scores as people use credit cards and bank loans to recover. That can lead to higher insurance rates, pushing monthly housing costs further out of reach.
“When a disaster hits, there’s a loss of income that occurs, and then that can impact someone’s credit score because they can’t pay their debt, they can’t pay their rent, they can’t pay their mortgage,” said Lance Triggs, executive vice president at Operation HOPE, a financial literacy nonprofit. “And now they’re faced with higher insurance premiums post-disaster.”
A working paper released today by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that homeowners with the lowest credit scores paid, on average, $550 more in 2024 for home insurance than those with the highest scores.
The findings broadly track with data from Quadrant Information Services analyzed by The New York Times, which found that, on average, lower credit scores meant higher premiums across every state that allowed the practice. Dr. Graetz used the same data set for his research, which he did in collaboration with the Consumer Federation of America and the Climate and Community Institute.
When a windstorm last year hit the home of Audrey Thayer, a city council member in Bemidji, Minn., it ripped the siding off her house and stripped shingles from her roof.
Ms. Thayer’s insurance did not cover all the damage. As she fought her insurer for more money, she opened new credit cards and bank loans to repair her home. Her credit score dropped as she tried to find a new insurance plan.
Ms. Thayer, a member of the White Earth Nation, said she was not aware that her credit score could affect her home insurance rates, even though she teaches about credit ratings at a nearby tribal college. “Most of the folks here do not have good credit,” said Ms. Thayer, whose community is one of the poorest in the state. “I did not know what a credit score was until I was 35 or so.”
In Texas, the advocacy group Texas Appleseed found that some insurers charge people with poor credit up to 12 times as much as people with excellent credit for certain policies, said Ann Baddour, the director of the nonprofit’s Fair Financial Services Project.
Higher costs have serious implications for low-income homeowners who live in the path of hurricanes, said Nadia Erosa, the operations manager at Come Dream Come Build, a nonprofit community housing development organization. After the Brownsville, Texas, region saw intense flooding last spring, some residents turned to companies offering high-interest loans to fund repairs, she said, raising the risk of the disaster-credit spiral.
“Delinquencies are going up because people cannot afford their payment,” she said.
The price of risk
Before they can get a mortgage, homebuyers are usually required by lenders to purchase home insurance.
“Households with insurance have fewer financial burdens, fewer unmet needs, they recover faster, they’re more likely to rebuild,” said Carolyn Kousky, an economist and founder of Insurance for Good, a nonprofit that focuses on finding new approaches to risk management. “Yet the people who need insurance the most are the least able to afford it.”
Insurance companies consider a variety of factors when setting the premium for a property. They might examine the age of the roof, or the area’s vulnerability to hurricanes or wildfires. They factor in how much it would cost to rebuild the house if it were damaged.
Insurers have argued that credit history is also worth considering because people with low scores tend to file more claims than those with excellent scores, an assertion that is backed up by the working paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research today. This likely happens because people with weaker credit histories tend to have less income, and when their home is damaged, they file insurance claims for smaller fixes that a wealthier homeowner might pay for out of pocket.
Paul Tetrault, senior director at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, a trade organization, said credit scores are a valid way to price premiums.
But others argue that using credit information to price insurance doesn’t make sense.
Because a homeowner pays for insurance upfront, “it’s not like you’re really extending a loan to the customer where you would be worried about the risk of repayment,” Ms. Kousky said. She points out that insurance companies can opt not to renew a homeowner’s policy if they believe it is too risky — a tactic they have been using with increasing frequency.
The NBER analysis found that homeowners who want to pay less for insurance should pay off debt to raise their credit score rather than replace roofs and make other improvements to avoid damage when disaster strikes.
Others believe that even if credit scores are accurate predictors of future claims, they shouldn’t be used to set premiums because that can perpetuate or worsen disparities. For example, people in their mid-20s who are Black, low-income, or grow up in impoverished regions have significantly lower credit scores than their peers, a July working paper from Opportunity Insights, a not-for-profit organization at Harvard University, found.
“When the government and the financial system mandate that we buy a product, there’s a special obligation to make sure the pricing is fair,” said Doug Heller, director of insurance at the Consumer Federation. “To me that is an absolutely solid reason, just like we don’t allow pricing based on race or income or ethnicity or religion.”
A natural experiment
A handful of states, including California and Massachusetts, have banned or limited the use of credit scores in setting home insurance premiums, despite opposition from the insurance industry.
In Nevada, where a temporary pandemic-related rule prevented insurers from using credit history to increase premiums for existing customers from 2020 to 2024, companies refunded approximately $27 million to nearly 200,000 policyholders, said Drew Pearson, a spokesman for the Nevada Division of Insurance.
Perhaps the clearest example of the effects of these bans comes from Washington State, which banned the use of credit information in setting home insurance premiums starting in June 2021. The rule immediately faced legal challenges, and was in effect for just a few months until it was overturned in court.
But the episode allowed researchers to evaluate the effect of credit factors on insurance premiums. When the rule took effect, people with the lowest credit scores saw a decrease in premiums of about $175 annually while those with the highest scores saw an increase of about $100, the NBER analysis found.
“We could see the dynamics of insurance pricing for the same households over time,” said Benjamin Keys, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who co-authored the paper.
What homeowners paid before and after a ban on credit-based pricing in Washington State
Values compared with premiums paid by homeowners with “medium” credit scores (717 to 756)
In Minnesota, where Tara Novak, Petra Rodriguez and Audrey Thayer live, a state task force looked at ways to lower insurance costs for residents. It recently considered a ban or limit on the use of credit scores to set rates, but did not move forward with a recommendation.
Ms. Rodriguez said she doesn’t think it’s fair that her friend Ms. Novak should have to pay so much more for insurance to live in an identical house.
A credit score doesn’t capture anything about a person’s habits, or what they’re like as a tenant, or even years of on-time rent payments, she said. “It’s not who you are,” she said.
Methodology
Home insurance policy rates were supplied by Quadrant Information Services, an insurance data solutions company. The rates shown are representative of publicly sourced filings and should not be interpreted as bindable quotes. Actual individual premiums may vary.
‘States with the biggest pricing gaps’Rates shown are based on a home insurance policy with $400,000 of dwelling coverage and a $100,000 liability limit on a new home, for a homeowner age 50 or younger. Rates are averaged for all the individual company filings represented in the sample, which add up to a majority of the market share in each state but do not cover all active insurers in the state. Rates are also averaged to the state level from zip code level data.
‘The credit penalty in each state’Each insurance company incorporates credit history information differently, often using proprietary methods, so the scores do not map directly to FICO credit scores.
‘What homeowners paid before and after a ban on credit-based pricing in Washington State’Data shown are based on observations of real home insurance policies and homeowner credit scores from ICE McDash analyzed by the researchers of Blonz, Hossain, Keys, Mulder and Weill (2026). The price comparisons across credit score tiers controlled for variance in disaster risk, insurance policy characteristics, geography, and other year to year fluctuations.
Planetary warming has significantly accelerated over the past 10 years, with temperatures rising at a higher rate since 2015 than in any previous decade on record, a new study showed.
The Earth warmed around 0.35 degrees Celsius in the decade to 2025, compared to just under 0.2C per decade on average between 1970 and 2015, according to a paper published on Friday in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. This is the first statistically significant evidence of an acceleration of global warming, the authors said.
The past three years have been the hottest on record, compared to the average before the Industrial Revolution. In 2024, warming went past 1.5C, the lower limit set by the Paris Agreement. That target refers to temperature increases over 20 years, but breaching it for one year shows efforts to slow down climate change have been insufficient, the scientists who wrote the new paper said.
The findings shed light on an ongoing debate among researchers. While there is consensus that greenhouse gas emissions have caused the planet to heat up since pre-industrial times, that warming had been steady for decades. But record-breaking temperatures in recent years have led scientists to question whether the pace of temperature gains is accelerating.
Demonstrating that was difficult due to natural fluctuations in temperatures. The researchers filtered out the “noise” to make the “underlying long-term warming signal” more clearly visible, said Grant Foster, a co-author of the study and a U.S.-based statistics expert.
Researchers isolated phenomena including the El Niño weather phase, volcanic eruptions and solar irradiance. When looking at temperature increases without their influence, the authors concluded the evidence is “strong” that the accelerated warming was not due to an unusually hot 2023 and 2024, but that since 2015 global temperatures departed from their previous, slower path of warming.
The new report adds to a growing body of work that indicates climate change is having a quicker and larger impact on the planet than scientists have understood. A separate paper published this week found that many studies on sea-level increases underestimate how much water along the coast has already risen.
“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5C limit of the Paris Agreement before 2030,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, the lead author of the warming study and a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.”
Millan writes for Bloomberg.
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